Almost 180,000 Canadian enterprises imported or exported over $1 trillion in goods in 2018. Nearly 90% of this activity was attributable to a relatively small number of enterprises (30,369) that both export and import goods.

In 2018, 45,081 Canadian enterprises or 0.7% of the total Canadian business population exported goods. The number of Canadian enterprises importing goods was almost four times higher—at 164,553 or 2.6% of the business population.

Exports of goods rose 8.1% in 2018 to a record $522.8 billion. Canadian firms from the oil and gas extraction (+$15.4 billion), chemical manufacturing (+$4.3 billion) and petroleum product wholesale (+$4.2 billion) industries led the increase in export sales.

Imports of goods totalled $564.3 billion in 2018, up 6.0% from 2017. Major contributors were firms from the petroleum product wholesale (+$5.7 billion), the machinery, equipment and supplies wholesale (+$5.4 billion) and the petroleum and coal product manufacturing (+$4.0 billion) industries.

This has been excerpted from a 14 May 2019 release by Statistics Canada.